Gusterson reared up out of the pancake phone to take a deep breath. A sulky-lipped sylph-figured girl two feet from him twitched — medium cootch, he judged — then fumbled in her belt-bag for a pill and popped it in her mouth.
“Hell, the tickler’s not even efficient yet about little things,” Gusterson blatted, diving back into the privacy-yashmak he was sharing with Fay. “Whyn’t that girl’s doctor have the Moodmaster component of her tickler inject her with medicine?”
“Her doctor probably wants her to have the discipline of pill-taking — or the exercise,” Fay answered glibly. “Look sharp now. Here’s where we fork. I’m taking you through Micro’s postern.”
A ribbon of slidewalk split itself from the main band and angled off into a short alley. Gusterson hardly felt the constant-speed juncture as they crossed it. Then the secondary ribbon speeded up, carrying them at about 30 feet a second toward the blank concrete wall in which the alley ended. Gusterson prepared to jump, but Fay grabbed him with one hand and with the other held up toward the wall a badge and a button. When they were about ten feet away the wall whipped aside, then whipped shut behind them so fast that Gusterson wondered momentarily if he still had his heels and the seat of his pants.
Fay, tucking away his badge and pancake phone, dropped the button in Gusterson’s vest pocket. “Use it when you leave,” he said casually. “That is, if you leave.”
Gusterson, who was trying to read the Do and Don’t posters papering the walls they were passing, started to probe that last sinister supposition, but just then the ribbon slowed, a swinging door opened and closed behind them and they found themselves in a luxuriously furnished thinking box measuring at least eight feet by five.
“Hey, this is something,” Gusterson said appreciatively to show he wasn’t an utter yokel. Then, drawing on research he’d done for period novels, “Why, it’s as big as a Pullman car compartment, or a first mate’s cabin in the War of 1812. You really must rate.”
Fay nodded, smiled wanly and sat down with a sigh on a compact overstuffed swivel chair. He let his arms dangle and his head sink into his puffed shoulder cape. Gusterson stared at him. It was the first time he could ever recall the little man showing fatigue.
“Tickler currently does have one serious drawback,” Fay volunteered. “It weighs 28 pounds. You feel it when you’ve been on your feet a couple of hours. No question we’re going to give the next model that antigravity feature you mentioned for pursuit grenades. We’d have had it in this model except there were so many other things to be incorporated.” He sighed again. “Why, the scanning and decision-making elements alone tripled the mass.”
“Hey,” Gusterson protested, thinking especially of the sulky-lipped girl, “do you mean to tell me all those other people were toting two stone?”
Fay shook his head heavily. “They were all wearing Mark 3 or 4. I’m wearing Mark 6,” he said, as one might say, “I’m carrying the genuine Cross, not one of the balsa ones.”
But then his face brightened a little and he went on. “Of course the new improved features make it more than worth it … and you hardly feel it at all at night when you’re lying down … and if you remember to talcum under it twice a day, no sores develop … at least not very big ones….”
Backing away involuntarily, Gusterson felt something prod his right shoulderblade. Ripping open his coat, he convulsively plunged his hand under it and tore out Fay’s belt-bag … and then set it down very gently on the top of a shallow cabinet and relaxed with the sigh of one who has escaped a great, if symbolic, danger. Then he remembered something Fay had mentioned. He straightened again.
“Hey, you said it’s got scanning and decision-making elements. That means your tickler thinks, even by your fancy standards. And if it thinks, it’s conscious.”
“Gussy,” Fay said wearily, frowning, “all sorts of things nowadays have S&DM elements. Mail sorters, missiles, robot medics, high-style mannequins, just to name some of the Ms. They ‘think,’ to use that archaic word, but it’s neither here nor there. And they’re certainly not conscious.”
“Your tickler thinks,” Gusterson repeated stubbornly, “just like I warned you it would. It sits on your shoulder, ridin’ you like you was a pony or a starved St. Bernard, and now it thinks.”
“Suppose it does?” Fay yawned. “What of it?” He gave a rapid sinuous one-sided shrug that made it look for a moment as if his left arm had three elbows. It stuck in Gusterson’s mind, for he had never seen Fay use such a gesture and he wondered where he’d picked it up. Maybe imitating a double-jointed Micro Finance chief? Fay yawned again and said, “Please, Gussy, don’t disturb me for a minute or so.” His eyes half closed.
Gusterson studied Fay’s sunken-cheeked face and the great puff of his shoulder cape.
“Say, Fay,” he asked in a soft voice after about five minutes, “are you meditating?”
“Why, no,” Fay responded, starting up and then stifling another yawn. “Just resting a bit. I seem to get more tired these days, somehow. You’ll have to excuse me, Gussy. But what made you think of meditation?”
“Oh, I just got to wonderin’ in that direction,” Gusterson said. “You see, when you first started to develop Tickler, it occurred to me that there was one thing about it that might be real good even if you did give it S&DM elements. It’s this: having a mech secretary to take charge of his obligations and routine in the real world might allow a man to slide into the other world, the world of thoughts and feelings and intuitions, and sort of ooze around in there and accomplish things. Know any of the people using Tickler that way, hey?”
“Of course not,” Fay denied with a bright incredulous laugh. “Who’d want to loaf around in an imaginary world and take a chance of missing out on what his tickler’s doing? — I mean, on what his tickler has in store for him — what he’s told his tickler to have in store for him.”
Ignoring Gusterson’s shiver, Fay straightened up and seemed to brisken himself. “Ha, that little slump did me good. A tickler makes you rest, you know — it’s one of the great things about it. Pooh-Bah’s kinder to me than I ever was to myself.” He buttoned open a tiny refrigerator and took out two waxed cardboard cubes and handed one to Gusterson. “Martini? Hope you don’t mind drinking from the carton. Cheers. Now, Gussy old pal, there are two matters I want to take up with you—”
“Hold it,” Gusterson said with something of his old authority. “There’s something I got to get off my mind first.” He pulled the typed pages out of his inside pocket and straightened them. “I told you about these,” he said. “I want you to read them before you do anything else. Here.”
Fay looked toward the pages and nodded, but did not take them yet. He lifted his hands to his throat and unhooked the clasp of his cape, then hesitated.
“You wear that thing to hide the hump your tickler makes?” Gusterson filled in. “You got better taste than those other moles.”
“Not to hide it, exactly,” Fay protested, “but just so the others won’t be jealous. I wouldn’t feel comfortable parading a free-scanning decision-capable Mark 6 tickler in front of people who can’t buy it — until it goes on open sale at twenty-two fifteen tonight. Lot of shelterfolk won’t be sleeping tonight. They’ll be queued up to trade in their old tickler for a Mark 6 almost as good as Pooh-Bah.”